Incidentally Biz Stone’s inventions are kind of revolutionary in social media – he also founded Blogger ( blogging and micro blogging have done more to confound LarryRank algorithm at Google Search than anyone else).

What does an analytic, data whining blog have to do with social media. Plenty. If you have ever designed a propensity scoring model for targeting customers based on their behavior , more clean data that is identifiable an individual level is always a boon. The current trend for sentiment analysis is simply addition of text keywords ( or categorical variables if you insist) to the existing customer database.

Can adding keywords from blogs, tweets, web searches, TO existing data about you (credit bureau, demographic, purchase behavior)- can this lead to a better lift in the models. Yes.

Will this lead to more privacy debates. Yes. Given the huge volume of text variables, as well as the huge number of potential customers- privacy debates are quite statistically irrational ( but we digress into economics here).

No one is interested in selling just 1 more product. They use people (nicknamed Numerati) for writing queries to append, manipulate data so as to AGGREGATE and then build a model. Only after the models are built are the scores disaggregated AND scored individually- usually in automated manner.

No company is interested in selling to one consumer so they dont stoop at a privacy invasive search of individuals.

Advertsing is not an evil way of making money, Mr Stone. Just Trust Google and the guys who could not complete their Phd because they WERE making money.

What if all maths grads did that- ..and that’s an interesting thought.

Hi,

We’d like to let you know about our new Terms of Service. As Twitter
has evolved, we’ve gained a better understanding of how folks use the
service. As a result, we’ve updated the Terms and we’re notifying
account holders.

We’ve posted a brief overview on our company blog and you can read the
Terms of Service online. If you haven’t been by in a while, we invite
you to visit Twitter to see what else is new.

These updates complement the spirit of Twitter. If the nature of our
service changes, we’ll revisit the Terms as necessary. Comments are
welcome, please find the “feedback” link on the Terms of Service page.